Looking into the short history of video game design one may gain insight into much more than the narrative frames pertaining to the various manners of electronically manipulating images. From games like Minecraft, Call of Duty, and other first-person designs, to games like Diablo, World of Warcraft, that is, games utilising a third person perspective and defined as RPGs (role-playing games), the relationship towards possession changes drastically, especially when considering the various approaches toward the inventory, a trusted element of game design. Continue reading “Your Inventory is Full”

The iterations (one towel, two towels, three times a towel) follow in a line that reinstates the identity of an object, the identity of which was never at risk. No threat of dispersion in sight, no misuse of its meaning, function, cultural or societal role — yet they affirm their representational counterpart without ever becoming or fully alluding to one. The collection does not consist of actual towels per se, nor of objects resembling them, but more so of a dynamic between the frame and the fold, the glare and the colourisation.

A short reflection (the second in the series) that focuses on the dynamics of the surface in contemporary art, specifically the recent tendency to patch that, which is in no need of patching, and the specific contemporary anxiety that accompanies it.

The world is in need of healing, it is often said. From over-the-counter food supplements that help combat burnout to the anxiety-re-ridden teenagers re-actualising the subject of depression via the prominent rise of sad rappers such as XXXTentacion, in a preachy way Logic, and others (not the most exhaustive list, but burnout draws out even these very fingers doing the typing), we are hurt, hurting, and don’t know where the bottom of this pit of hurt lies.

The short reflection focuses on plaster as a materialisation of the paradox of abstraction within the formation of contemporary artistic positions.

Plaster, used both for protective and decorative purposes in walls and ceilings, meets contemporary art on the intersection of the aesthetic and pragmatic, mostly due to its soft white aesthetic characteristic and fragile kinetic effects. In this short reflection, I will take a look at two artistic practices that both use the mentioned building material in order to explore various layers of destructive, even self-destructive, principles and phenomena of contemporary society. From death drive to the autonomisation of capital, the practices brush over multiple sides of what it means to fail at being ‘human’.

The practices at hand are namely that of Lenka’s Đorojević and Matej’s Stupica, I will focus particularly on the works ‘Neur-o-matic’ (2014) and ‘Mon-o-matic’ (2015), and that of Evelyn’s Loschy, concretely, the kinetic sculptures (2012-2016).

Mute — not even speech as the thinkers of politicality of excluded minorities would put it, but mute uncommunicable, radically private (exempt from any possibility of equality or commensurability) — situatedness, determinable only in the context of a private sense, a sort of sensus privatus that even for Kant results only in madness.

And what is madness, for instance in the context of the psychoanalytic situation, if not putting into speech the unspeakable, the transition of an a-communicable neurotic into the communicability of analysis? The reading, the mapping, and the speaking. The path from sensus privatus to sensus communis. — Even as Kant’s certainty of common sense, the cognitive base of communality and sociality, the implicit presupposition of a naturally present and correct thought that founds its critique not only in Nietzsche but following his lead also in Deleuze, gives way to a sort of common non-sense, …

… The assertion of communality seems to persist. Which could also serve as a cynical ‘good riddance’ to the exhibition Next of skin that finds itself even more communicable at its attempt of a-communicability: in the neatly coded context of an exhibition space, an exhibition event and most importantly a conversation piece, where the snares or the obstacles (which the exhibited artworks present) fuel only the most frivolous conversational giggling of young cultural intellectuals. Continue reading “– the cords”

Discerning the precise relationship between various fields of truth, knowledge, meaning or sense production, whatever the task at hand may be, leads to a constant re-articulation of what is or could be denoted by the term science, mathematics, and art — what are their constitutive procedures that define and distinguish them from each other. This may resemble the now distant (although sometimes still to present) tendencies of grand systematisation, however the questions that seem to be most prevalent in this regard are not too concerned with the apparent autonomy of the mentioned fields, but rather with traversing their differences, tracing underlying commonalities and most importantly forming their implicit genealogies.

It is this line of questioning that defines the artistic practice of Nicole Prutsch, at least as presented at her recent exhibition La Méthode at the MUSA Museum Startgalerie Artothek in Vienna. Continue reading “CUT-“